ON RAGLAN ROAD. To 8 September.

London.

ON RAGLAN ROAD
by Tom O’Brien.

Old Red Lion 418 St John Street EC1 4NJ To 8 September 2007.
Tue-Sat 8pm.
Runs 1hr 50min One interval.

TICKETS: 020 7837 7816.
Review: Timothy Ramsden 2 September.

Fascinating life-story even with qualifications.
Everybody’s heard of Brendan Behan, roistering drunkard and IRA-supporting author of The Hostage, The Quare Fellow etc. Fewer know the non-playwriting poet Patrick Kavanagh, to whom Behan was nemesis and neighbour on Dublin’s Raglan road around the mid-century. Kavanagh, saluted in Tom O’Brien’s 2004 play as the finest Irish poet of the age, was Behan’s opposite in many ways and the two loathed each other openly and vociferously.

Kavanagh freely attacked Irish writers (W B Yeats included) in his savage journalism, except those who left the country. Years after his unsatisfied pursuit – central to this play - of Hilda Moriarty, a woman who loved his poetry and his soul but no more, he finally married someone else, but their home was in London and he kept her secret from Dublin friends.

Unsympathetic to Kavanagh’s pro-Englishness, Behan also tormented him on his rural origins, while Kavanagh used his Monaghan farming childhood against city folks who had no way with animals. While Behan put on a show, with a persona which delighted by outraging, Kavanagh was an unseemly amalgam of unsociable manners, a big ungainly figure in Nik Wood-Jones’ performance, who remained grudging and obscene, drunk and impoverished, while drink was something Behan could capitalise on as well as enjoy.

Russell Kennedy’s revival succeeds almost in its own despite. Its slow deliberation holds too many slight pauses in Wood-Jones’s Kavanagh which never cohere as a deliberate manner, but build expectations for responses which are usually insulting rather than witty. And it may be the poet had the habit of staring ahead into the air, but the sense of a performance directed to the upper stretches of the Old Red Lion’s back walls is distracting.

Josephine McCaffrey clearly shows Hilda’s dual attitude to this ungainly bear with a beautiful soul but rebarbative shell, but the character’s only incidentally employed in later scenes. And Jimmy O’Rourke’s Behan is a rather tidied-up firefly annoying and cowing his literary enemy.

Yet this play still opens up an intriguing life known to comparatively few, that of a writer who by nature refused to fit any comfortable category.

Anthony Cronin: Russell Kennedy.
Patrick Kavanagh: Nik Wood-Jones.
Hilda Moriarty: Josephine McCaffrey
Brendan Behan: Jimmy O’Rourke

Director: Russell Kennedy

2007-09-04 10:33:16